Page 97 of Wretched Thorns

She forced herself to read through the magics slowly.

There were three wards she could see and a fourth she could feel the edge of but could not yet read. The first was a binding circle laid around the garçonniere itself — a ring at the foundation of the raised piers, drawn into the wood, set to lock anything walking up to the door inside it once they tripped the inner line. The second was a hex she did not know the origins of or even its kin. It was laid across the path between the tree line and the garçonniere steps. The third was a lock spell on the door itself, the kind that did not just refuse a hand on the handle but pushed the hand back hard enough to break the bones in it.

The fourth one was much older, darker. She did not have a label for it yet. All of them were nasty pieces of work, intent on weakening any who crossed them.

She turned her head a fraction toward Callum.

“Three I can read. One I can’t.”

“The one you can’t?”

“Older. Deeper. I want to dispel it last.”

Callum did not argue.

She reached into the inside of her jacket and pulled out the first of the paper packets sealed with wax that was no longer warm. She passed one to Callum, one to Dex, and kept one for herself.

“Binding circle at the foundation. Drop one as you cross the threshold ‌where the pier meets the ground. The hex on the path is mine. I’ll drop it as we step across. The lock on the door is —”

None of them knew the bolt had already slid.

***

Marcus came in.

He had taken his shirt off somewhere. He had a working knife in his right hand and a sigil drawn fresh on the inside of his left wrist, and his eyes had gone the gray-green color they went when he had decided. He had not fed recently. The skin at his temples had gone thin and paper-pale. But he still outweighed me by enough to matter. My ribs hurt when I breathed. The rope burn at my wrists was raw to the muscle. My legs were under me only by sheer will alone.

He stopped in the doorway.

He saw me on my feet.

He saw the silver rope on the floor.

He saw, I think, what he had always seen in me. A woman weak and vulnerable.

That was his last mistake, and it was the same mistake he had been making since the first night, the one all men like him make eventually because their power depends on it being true. He looked at a woman standing in the wreck of a room he had built to break her, free of bindings he had tied himself, wreathed in a dark he could not touch, and his eyes still slid past all of it to land on the only thing he knew how to see, which was prey. He had fed on me for three years and learned nothing about me. He had locked me in the dark for days and learned less. He had been so busy taking what I was that he never once looked at who I was, and now there was no time left for him to learn the difference, and that mistake was going to cost him dearly.

His mouth opened.

I smiled.

It was the same smile I had given him in the wood-paneled room after a romp in the grove, and the same smile I had given him in the chair room when he meant to torture me, and the same smile I had given him in this very room before he attacked me.

But this time the smile carried something the other three had not.

Three years of fucking enough; the storm that raged in me dwarfed that of the one kicking up outside. Armed with secrets from Tara’s grandmother, and a handful of hungry darkness, I was done.

He came at me.

***

The first thing I realized was that my body was going to fold.

The second thing I realized was that the shadows were not going to let it.

They came up the inside of my legs in a cold weight that was not warmth and was not muscle and was not mine, exactly, but was completely mine, and they took the load my knees had been about to drop. They came up my spine. They settled around the rib Marcus had cracked yesterday. They held everything that was about to fail.

I was standing on borrowed time, in borrowed armor, with borrowed support.